An Apple patent filing details how Siri can make it easier for users to search through pictures on their device.

The Siri virtual private assistant is an integral part of the iOS ecosystem and its safe to say that its not going anywhere any time soon. But what does the future hold for Siri? Apple filed for a patent back in March this year, titled “Voice-Based Image Tagging and Searching.” In the patent, the company describes how “natural language” strings can be associated with photos saved on an iOS device and how its digital assistant can search for those photos using only the strings relayed back by the user at any time.

For example if a user takes a photo on the beach and tells their device that “This is me at the beach,” that photo will be tagged accordingly. Now if they take a lot of pictures, they’re bound to spend considerable time searching through the entire camera roll just to find that picture of them on the beach. With Siri being able to look up photos, all the user would need to do is tell the digital assistant to “Show me photos of me at the beach,” and it would display all photos that are tagged with relevant strings. The patent describes that strings can cover an activity, an entity, a date or a location, thus making it almost natural for the users to simply speak out for the photos that they want to see.

This feature would no doubt be much appreciated by hundreds of millions of iOS users around the world, particularly those who tend to take a lot of photos with their device. However, it has been quite some time since Apple filed for this patent and it sure didn’t include this feature into iOS 7. Perhaps it has been left for iOS 8? Time will tell.